How and when was Simplelists founded, and what pain points were you trying to solve?
Simplelists was founded by me in 2003. At the time, I was at university and partaking in a large university club. I found it very difficult to effectively communicate to a large number of people via email. This was due to the restrictions put in place by email providers as to how many recipients an email could be sent to, but also the difficulty of managing a large list of email addresses (sharing them between other people, managing additions and removals, dealing with email failures, and so on). Having set up a group email service for my university club, I realized there was a high demand for this, so I went on to offer it as a paid service, which is what Simplelists has become today. More recently, sending group emails has become even more challenging, with ever-evolving improvements in email security and associated demands to implement these to ensure delivery. These are naturally a good thing for the email ecosystem, of course, but it makes the reliable delivery of emails more difficult. In the past few years, we have helped a number of enterprise clients with their delivery of group emails and email distribution lists. These organisations were previously doing so with internal systems, but they now feel it is too specialist and they find it more effective to outsource the service to a company such as Simplelists.What is the process of sending out a group email or a newsletter through Simplelists?
As the company name suggests, it’s very simple. It’s just a case of uploading a list of email addresses to a Simplelists account, and then an email can be sent to them all simply by composing it as a normal email in a normal email client and addressing it to the single group email address (instead of sending it to all the individual recipients). Simplelists will do the hard work of delivering it to all the recipients, be that a few dozen or thousands.What customization and management options and features do you offer?
Despite the name, Simplelists offers many powerful features to manage and customize list emails. The key point is that we present these options in an easy-to-use web interface, and that we only focus on the delivery of list emails, not other bells and whistles that can complicate the interface. To give a few examples of email customization, we offer the ability to add footers and headers to list emails, to add a subject prefix, and to insert merge tags (e.g., recipient’s name). We also offer anonymization so that a sender’s email address is changed to the list email address. This facilitates anonymous discussions. For managing lists, we offer many options over who can post to a list and which emails are held for moderation (if any). For example, emails over a certain size, from certain senders, containing certain content. We also offer automated bounce handling, so that failed deliveries to recipients are all managed easily by Simplelists.Can you elaborate on the hosting aspect of your services?
We are proud that we host in our own dedicated cloud hosting environment. This means firstly that we own our own dedicated IP space, so that there is no risk from “noisy neighbors” who might be sending spam or malicious emails. It also means that we can offer custom hosting options such as dedicated servers for our larger clients. This also means that we have better knowledge of our whole hosting infrastructure, which means that we are able to offer a more reliable hosting service.What sets you apart from your competitors?
I’ve already mentioned the flexibility around hosting. This also means that we are able to offer a service with high assurance of information security. We are certified to ISO27001, which means that the company has to undertake regular independent audits of security. We are also proud of our speed of email delivery and overall reliability. Our long-term customers cite this as one of the things they love about Simplelists: it always just works.Is there anything else about your work that you’d like to share that we haven’t covered?
The last couple of years, we’ve invested a lot in the ability to automate and integrate Simplelists with other services. We’ve greatly improved the external API, and we’re just about to launch webhooks and integration with Zapier (with other services to follow), which will enable Simplelists to be integrated with many other tools.To learn more about Simplelists, you can visit Simplelists.com
